Justus Frantz: Lenny Bernstein fell in love with me
OrchestrasThe German pianist and conductor is leaking snippets from his forthcoming authorised biography. He is open about his relationship with both women and men, among them an affair with Bernstein:
‘I had an intellectual and artistic friendship with Lenny.I know that Lenny had fallen in love with me. [We had] an ‘unbreakable bond’.
Hm.
Not much new about that.
‘Men can have a great attraction for me,’ he told the Hamburg Abendblatt.
photo: Bruce Duffie
Yesterdays’ gossip is like reboiled spaghetti, Stale.
How many people did Lenny fall in love with?
I don’t know about love? A tipsy Lenny hit-on my friend David, an amateur trombonist, at NYC’s Russian Tea room, in the 70’s. No autobiography is planned.
Perhaps a great loss for gossip columns. Less so for musicology.
Who is he?
I don’t think any Bernstein biography mentions him.
Atleast two spring to mind : the Burton one , and the memoirs of LB’s daughter .
Indeed! Just finished reading Burton’s book
The blogpost misquotes Justus Franz.
He said, »Männer können eine große Anziehungskraft auf mich ausüben«.
This means that Franz can be very attracted to men.
With Mr Putin leading the parade
Freak show.
Does anyone really care about all this tittle-tattle? How soon will this book be in the remainders section selling at less than half price? That’s not to say that he is not a fine musician though – just that he is hardly in the top echelon of conducters or pianists. In any case, the authorised biographies are never as interesting as the unauthorised ones.
I have an LP of his playing Dvorak’s Piano Concerto with the New York Philharmonic under Bernstein; knowing what they got up to before or after the recording is irrelevant to the quality of the fine performance. He recorded this rarely-heard work twice but it seems that virtually all his recordings were for obscure companies – he never seems to have had a long-term recording contract with a leading company such as Brendel had with Philips, for example. Could anyone suggest why?
I would put this book on the same level as Liz Truss’s forthcoming book about her life in Downing Street, of which I shall, with great enthusiasm, read both pages.
Franz made piano-duo recordings with Eschenbach. They were joined by German Helmut Schmidt in Bach and Beethoven concertos, shortly after Schmidt stepped down as Chancelor of Germany. I remember seeing the three of them on TV play the Mozart.
Here is a video of Franz, with Eschenbach and Karajan in the Mozart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuoolnbKWts
Oops, I mean Mozart and Bach concertos, for 3 or 4 keyboards. In Bach, Gerhard Oppitz joined the team.
I attended the concerts and the recording sessions of Schumann’s piano concerto in 1984. Bernstein conducted. The pianist was supposed to be András Schiff but Frantz arrived at the last minute. The playing was unexceptional but the Vienna Phil.was outstanding. I vividly remember the celli in the second movement, leaded by the regretted Robert Scheiwein. A video and a CD exist.
the book is described as ‘forthcoming’ unless you’ve had access to a preview copy.
Give it a chance : he may have great prose style/ depth of insight. You can’t judge it on the basis of a few self-congratulatory sentences.
Why, you ask? Because he’s simply a 3rd-rate pianist. Recording him in the virtually unknown Dvorak piano concerto was a clever move by Bernstein – figuring that nobody would be interested anyway. It vanished from view quickly enough, and there was no follow up by CBS.
The Dvorak is unassuming but is reputedly one of the most challenging piano concertos according to Leslie Howard who recorded the complete Liszt Piano works. Stephen Hough took a year out to learn it.
I’ve grown to really like the piece. One of my favourite performances is Richter/ Kondrashin from the Royal Albert Hall in the 1960s. Murky sonics but they both really capture the potential of the piece like no-one else i’ve heard.
Rudolf Firkusny was the undisputed champion of the Dvorak Piano Concerto.
I think Lenny Bernstein and his talents were incredible. I loved his family. His wife was amazing. I loved Bradley Coopers Maestro. Bradley is the best!
Bradley Cooper almost won that Best Actor Oscar by a nose.
He lost by a nose.
Franz has a rather inflated image of himself, based on that photo.
Lenny: “It’s not just us, Frantz.”
How old was Frantz when this happened?
Meh. Lenny “fell in love” with everybody. For all of 12 seconds at a time.
I believe at one point Justus, Christoph and Lenny were a”trio” perhaps at Christoph’s place in the Canary Islands.
Herbie Von Karajan was definitely Not invited.
Well, would *you* invite von Karajan to a three-way?
I picture Karajan as a mean daddy. I mean, in a good way.
Bernstein left Israel after his first visit in 1949 with a gift Prime Minister David Ben Gurion gave him without knowing it: the Israeli leader’s military attache.
Well, I’m very grateful for their “bond”. Justus was the director of the Schleswig Holstein Festival in which Bernstein conducted annually. I had the honor of singing as a soloist under Lenny’s baton there. What he did in his private life was his business. As a musician, he was phenomenal and a gift to the world.